The most popular and most imposing accusation directed against Bolshevik ‘amoralism’ bases itself on the so-called Jesuitical maxim of Bolshevism: “The end justifies the means.” From this it is not difficult to reach the further conclusion: since the Trotskyists, like all Bolsheviks (or Marxists) do not recognize the principles of morality, there is, consequently, no ‘principled’ difference between Trotskyism and Stalinism Q.E.D.
One completely vulgar and cynical American monthly conducted a questionnaire on the moral philosophy of Bolshevism. The questionnaire, as is customary, was to have simultaneously served the ends of ethics and advertisement. The inimitable H.G. Wells, whose high fancy is surpassed only by his Homeric self-satisfaction, was not slow in solidarising himself with the reactionary snobs of Common Sense. Here everything fell into order. But even those participants who considered it necessary to defend Bolshevism did so, in the majority of cases, not without timid evasions (Eastman): the principles of Marxism are, of course, bad, but among the Bolsheviks there are, nevertheless, worthy people. Truly, such ‘friends’ are more dangerous than enemies.
Should we care to take Messrs. Unmaskers seriously, then first of all we would ask them: what are your own moral principles? Here is a question that will scarcely receive an answer. Let us admit for the moment that neither personal nor social ends can justify the means. Then it is evidently necessary to seek criteria outside of historical society and those ends which arise in its development. But where? If not on earth, then in the heavens. In divine revelation popes long ago discovered faultless moral criteria. Petty, secular popes speak about eternal moral truths without naming their original source. However, we are justified in concluding: since these truths are eternal, they should have existed not only before the appearance of half-monkey-half-man upon the earth but before the evolution of the solar system. Whence then did they arise? The theory of eternal morals can in nowise survive without god.
Moralists of the Anglo-Saxon type, insofar as they do not confine themselves to rationalist utilitarianism, the ethics of bourgeois bookkeeping, appear conscious or unconscious students of Viscount Shaftesbury, who at the beginning of the 18th century (!) deduced moral judgments from a special “moral sense”, supposedly once and for all given to man. Supra-class morality inevitably leads to the acknowledgement of a special substance, of a ‘moral sense’, ‘conscience’, some kind of absolute, which is nothing more than the philosophic-cowardly pseudonym for god. Independent of ‘ends’, that is, of society, morality, whether we deduce it from eternal truths or from the ‘nature of man’, proves in the end to be a form of ‘natural theology’. Heaven remains the only fortified position for military operations against dialectical materialism.
At the end of the last century in Russia, there arose a whole school of ‘Marxists’ (Struve, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and others) who wished to supplement the teachings of Marx with a self-sufficient, that is, supra-class moral principle. These people began, of course, with Kant and the categorical imperative. But how did they end? Struve is now a retired minister of the Crimean baron Wrangel, and a faithful son of the church; Bulgakov is an Orthodox priest; Berdyaev expounds the Apocalypse in sundry languages. These metamorphoses, which seem so unexpected at first glance, are not at all explained by the ‘Slavic soul’ – Struve has a German soul – but by the sweep of the social struggle in Russia. The fundamental trend of this metamorphosis is essentially international.
Classical philosophic idealism insofar as it aimed in its time to secularize morality, that is, to free it from religious sanction, represented a tremendous step forward (Hegel). But having torn from heaven, moral philosophy had to find earthly roots. To discover these roots was one of the tasks of materialism. After Shaftesbury came Darwin, after Hegel – Marx. To appeal now to eternal moral truths signifies attempting to turn the wheels backward. Philosophic idealism is only a stage: from religion to materialism, or, contrariwise, from materialism to religion.